The Henry County CARE Team’s Celebration Kids committee would like to thank this great community for helping to make our annual Celebration Kids event a huge success.

In this time of economic uncertainty, we had anticipated having our work cut out for us, but we were pleasantly surprised by the very generous outpouring of support from local businesses, schools, agencies, churches and individuals who came through with the needed donations.

I look forward to Thursday mornings. This is the day I baby-sit my daughter’s two youngest children while she takes the three older girls to a home-schooling co-op at their church. For five hours I watch over Burt, age four and a half, and Mary, two. This is fun and interesting.

The Judy Lea Memorial Henry County Children’s Fund committee would like to thank all who helped make this year’s benefit a success. Our 23rd benefit for the children of Henry County raised more than $15,000.

A little less than a year from now, our state will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Kentucky Education Reform Act, widely considered to be one of the most important laws ever adopted by the General Assembly.

The legislation filled more than 900 pages, and within them were about 30 distinct ideas that, like the inner workings of a clock, depended on each other for reform to work.

It was a bold step at the time, but an array of national studies since then has repeatedly shown that our students have made significant strides in less than a generation.

This is the time of the year when cold Arctic air frequently meets warm Gulf air thereby spawning the tornados that plague the Midwest. Kentucky gets its share, which concerns me. Growing up in New York, there just weren’t any tornados. The Wizard of Oz afforded the sum total of my knowledge about those swirling winds and I was quite impressed at an early age by their capacity for destruction. Since then, I lived in Kansas long enough to gain serious firsthand knowledge.